


secretary of war (son, ghost)

by anupturnedboat



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Abraham Lincoln - Freeform, Angst, Gen, Post-Civil War, Robert Todd Lincoln - Freeform, Time Travel, What Gets Left Behind, time travel angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 08:42:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8482870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anupturnedboat/pseuds/anupturnedboat
Summary: On the day his father was shot, two things became certain: one, his family was profoundly, ridiculously, ill-fated, and two, there were things on this earth that defied explanation.
Post 1x2





	

On the day his father was shot, two things became certain: one, his family was profoundly, ridiculously, ill-fated, and two, there were things on this earth that defied explanation.

Both were bitter pills to swallow, but the second disconcertingly so, because he had grown up distant, embarrassed by his parent's superstitions. Discomfited by the sound of his mother’s constant weeping and ashamed of the company she kept - charlatans conducting séances and swindlers promising visions of the future.

He grieved as much as his parents, but understood, even as a boy that life went on - must go on, for the living. And so he had always known that he was nothing like them. His feet were planted firmly on solid ground. He did not believe in magic, or ghosts, or premonitions.

Then, on what would be the worst day of his life, there was the woman in an ill-fitting dress, with a name that he knew was a lie. In the moment (a delicate, tension filled sixty seconds at most), he was reminded of his father’s story about a shower of stars and great fireballs in the Illinois sky. And he understood about the exhilarating crackle of static along your spine and the shifting of solid ground that you could actually feel in the face of the unexpected extraordinary.

And on this day, he knew that his parents had been right all along – that the world was full of mysteries.

Today is only the second time he’s felt like the stars were falling. It happens in a train station, forty feet away from President Garfield, whom he’s rushing to meet.

The woman – _Juliet (_ his memory supplies) is pushing through the crowd. Everything stops, and he forgets all about the president. He forgets his wife, his children, and his childhood of embarrassments. She was real and nothing if not an extraordinary confluence of falling stars and the unexplained.

The shot rings out before he can formulate any coherent thoughts about why she looks exactly the same while he has grown gray. Or why she still dresses like an actress playing the wrong part.

_He had never intended to attend that dreary play that night_ ; he imagines himself saying. Everything had changed, and he’s sure her sudden appearance and complete disappearance was somehow intrinsically entwined with the awful event.

Then, time speeds up, and two men are wrestling another man to the ground. He rushes towards the President and barks out orders. His hands are covered in blood, and he’s trying to remember the kind of words that comfort.

When he looks up the woman has disappeared, and the ghosts of 1865 flutter through the station like static electricity.


End file.
